The Count: First-Round Survivors Brush Off Scares

Though the top 12 seeds in the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament went a combined 24-0 in the first two rounds, four of those teams barely escaped from the first round: Pitt, Villanova, Kansas and Memphis all saw their leads shrink to six points or fewer at some point in the last three minutes of their openers, in what were expected to be cakewalks. These games made for great theater but mediocre leading indicators: The four teams won their next four games against what should have been stiffer competition by an average of 16 points.

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CSUN’s Mark Hill helped put a scare in Memphis in the first round, but the Tigers bounced back to rout Maryland.

That’s in keeping with recent tournament history, when first-round scares haven’t been particularly reliable gauges of vulnerability — suggesting they say more about match-ups, timing and luck than about the strength of the winners. In the last 10 tournaments, including this year’s, 45 top three seeds have advanced to the second round by a margin of fewer than 15 points, while 72 teams have won their openers by 15 points or more. (The other three top-three seeds were upset victims in the first round.) The first group went on to win 67% of their second-round games, with an average scoring margin of 5.6 points. The second group won 74% of second-rounders with an average margin of 6.5 points.

Even this cursory analysis likely overstates the predictive value of a first-round scare, because only seven No. 1 seeds have experienced such a close shave so early, compared to 17 No. 2 seeds and 21 No. 3 seeds. So the second group, those teams that won first-round games in routs, includes more top seeds, who’d be expected to have a bigger mismatch in the second round than the next group of seeds. Those seven top seeds with a first-round scare, incidentally, were 7-0 in the second round and won an average of 2.2 more games after the first-round scare, compared to an average of 2.5 wins for the top seeds who won their openers in routs.

Some caveats: I chose 15 points, somewhat arbitrarily, as the dividing line between a challenging game and an easy one; 10 points would have excluded all of this year’s scares, in which the favorite eventually pulled away to win with a double-digit margin. Also, this is a small sample size, skewed particularly by the bizarre second round of the 2000 tournament, when top-three seeds went a combined 4-8.

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